Motivational Quotes

Music

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

- Mann, Thomas

Best Quotes about Music

A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.

Carey, Mariah

There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.

Pound, Ezra

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.

Gershwin, George

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.

Britten, Benjamin

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

Cosby, Bill

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.

Joel, Billy

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

I was a veteran before I was a teenager.

Jackson, Michael

10.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Morrison, Van

11.

Rock 'n Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.

Packard, Vance

12.

There is two kinds of music the good and bad. I play the good kind.

Armstrong, Louis

13.

Words are poor interpreters in the realms of emotion. When all words end, music begins; when they suggest, it realizes; and hence is the secret of its strange, inexpressible power.

Haweis, H. R.

14.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

George Eliot

15.

Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.

Martin Luther

16.

Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.

John Erskine

17.

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics.

Johnson, James Weldon

18.

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

Mann, Thomas

19.

They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.

Stevens, Wallace

20.

A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out.

Newman, Ernest

21.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

22.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

Thomas, Lewis

23.

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

Hesse, Hermann

24.

Music causes us to think eloquently.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

Rattle, Simon

26.

Without Elvis, none of us could have made it.

Holly, Buddy

27.

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.

Luther, Martin

28.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Kin Hubbard

29.

It's a marvelous feeling when someone says I want to do this song of yours because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.

Carpenter, Mary Chapin

30.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

31.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.

Robert Fripp

32.

A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it.

Sir Thomas Beecham

33.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

Camus, Albert

34.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Johnson, Samuel

35.

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.

Genet, Jean

36.

Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!

J. K. Rowling

37.

All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!

Yoko Ono

38.

We are aware that the conductor is not really making the music, it is making him -- if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.

Brook, Peter (Stephen Paul)

39.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Einstein, Albert

40.

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

41.

Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it.

Gallagher, Liam

42.

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.

Stravinsky, Igor

43.

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

44.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

George Bernard Shaw

45.

Music should never be harmless.

Robertson, Robbie

46.

The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

47.

You're talking to someone who really understands rock music.

Gore, Tipper

48.

I hate music, especially when it's played.

Jimmy Durante

49.

Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

50.

The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races. The economics of this musical Esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.

Steiner, George